


something to hold onto

by miss_echidna



Series: all your faves have anxiety [3]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen, Panic Attacks, Post-Episode: s07e25 What You Leave Behind, ezri dax cry-fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 08:58:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17722148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_echidna/pseuds/miss_echidna
Summary: it was traumatic, she thinks, purely from an academic perspective, putting herself into the chair of the counselled, instead of the counsellor. the symbiont upturned her life in ways she’s only just starting to forgive it for, and her joining scar still kind of hurts and when she panics her only thought is toget it out!even after how long it’s been, after all she’s been through.ezri, years later.





	something to hold onto

she wants to scream. her nails dig into her palms, her teeth grind. when she breathes, it’s in loud, painful gasps. a cold web of fear runs its fingers across her collarbones and down her sternum to where dax sits, agitated under her skin. without further prompt, her nails dig into the flesh there. her fingers are weak, her limbs are weak. there’s barely enough time for her to realise that this never happened before she was joined. she was never so completely and utterly afraid.

julian once told her about rickets in human children, how the limbs bend and warp. she kicks out at her blankets, sits up in her bed, haunted by the image. her skin feels tight. it doesn’t feel like her own. when she stands, or tries to, her knees, weak and tired and stressed, buckle. 

from the floor she murmurs computer full lights, and blinks into the brightness.

her hands clutch around for something to hold onto, an anchor of sorts. something to remind her she is real and she is alive and, even after everything, she is still ezri. her breathing slows, and she hoists herself to her feet. 

taking steps feels like walking through thick symbiont pools, sluggish and subdued. she manages to make it to her drawers, shivering, and she plucks out something comfortable to wear. 

she manages only for a few minutes until she succumbs again. the air, the vacuum of her quarters pulls at her skin, jolts her with static electricity up her arms. her eyes squeeze shut, and she clamps down on her feelings, shoving them away. she can’t stay here, alone, in this state. she needs lights, she needs warm bodies: people who are loud and laughing and alive. for a moment, she almost wishes julian was still around, wrapped up in her sheets. he would hold her, if she asked, if she commed him, but she dismisses the thought immediately as the reflex of an exhausted mind. they are not for each other. they both knew that. 

instead, she looks at herself in the mirror, pale and wide-eyed, and turns her shaking hands into fists behind her back. remembers all of who she is. then she walks very quickly to quark’s. 

the bar is loud and full. the bartender has to raise his voice over the din. she orders a martini. lots of olives.

jadzia never liked vodka, she remembers. her predecessor preferred bloodwine and romulan ale and other, brutal drinks. audrid liked spring wine and pinot noir and fruity trill specialties. she could go on. she could talk for days about what each host liked to drink. when her martini slides along the bar, all three olives bobbing pleasantly inside, she smiles to herself, because it’s her drink. 

it’s easy, the commission first told her, when she sent that first communique. it’s easy to lose yourself in the symbiont when you don’t have training, and we hope that doesn’t happen to you and here’s a book about it and instructions for how to get in contact with a trill counsellor if you have any questions. she smiles at her martini. in the early days she was never sure who she was. they were right: it’s so easy to get lost, and yet, her crowning success: she didn’t drown. 

she does still get overwhelmed. still, years into her joining. she gets panic attacks and spacesick and overrun by all the voices. objectively, the knowledge was always there: this is why initiates go through years and years of training, why they’re all so much older than she was when they’re finally joined, why so many wash out—and yet why they had to be trained so much had only just sunk in after the joining. keeping herself above it all is a full time job, and then (and then, she thinks, with a wry smile) she has to go and tell other people on the station how to live balanced, healthy lives.

she thinks often, with some bitterness, about what her joining could have been like if she was really prepared for it. if she wanted it. getting the symbiont inside her, when all is said and done, was rushed and frightening and not at all the sacredness she was taught it was. that jadzia was told it was—and had even experienced! 

she was told: it’s your choice, but the host is gone and the symbiont has taken a turn and you’re the only trill on board. she can’t—she doesn’t think she’ll ever get over how her stomach dropped, and how she thought: there is no way that they understand exactly what they’re asking me to do. 

it was traumatic, she thinks, purely from an academic perspective, putting herself into the chair of the counselled, instead of the counsellor. the symbiont upturned her life in ways she’s only just starting to forgive it for, and her joining scar still kind of hurts and when she panics her only thought is to get it out! even after how long it’s been, after all she’s been through. it asked her to give up her body, her own quiet space in her mind, her very personality, for nine very loud lives —without training or a guide. 

she’s put off her zhian’tara for so long. they wanted her to have it within the first six months, if not immediately, but the war saw to that never happening. now, she thinks, writhing anxiously in her chair, she’s living on borrowed time. it’s going to happen soon, and she’s going to have to face up to jadzia, who she can never possibly live up to, and she’s going to meet all the ones that came before—all of the ones inside her, that are her. 

it’s hard enough knowing that she wasn’t right for the joining, never wanted it, never revered it like she was supposed to in the first place, and yet she still got one anyway. initiates spend years and years in the program only to wash out at the very end, and yet she managed to skip the line. there must be initiates at the commission right now who curse her name. after all that, she couldn’t imagine meeting a proper joined trill in the flesh, let alone the ones currently inside her. 

the commission doesn’t tell non-initiates this—they fear a kind of public concern that would pollute their complete adoring reverence for it—but as much as it is a kind of immortality, the joining is a death. a small death, but a death nonetheless. she was immediately reborn (to a new ezri, ezri dax) but she’ll never be who she was again, and nobody thought it right—nobody thought at all—to mourn her except for her. 

 

she doesn’t resent them for it—nobody would understand except her; there hasn’t been an unplanned joining probably since verad dax, and before him, since decades and centuries ago. there is nobody quite like her, and the thought makes her teeth worry at her lip—a habit, she thinks, that is purely and completely her own. 

it all happened so terrifyingly quickly: jadzia’s death, being joined, then immediately beginning her search for benjamin, where she hoped and prayed everything would begin to make sense—she barely had time to come to grips with who she was and who she had been before she was thrust into a whole new life. and then there was the war, and julian, and then not julian, and now it’s just her and her memories and the horrible sinking feeling that doesn’t seem to want to go away. 

she stirs her martini, eats the olives all in a row. one, two, three. 

she remembers what used to calm her, before she was joined. the warp harmonics on the destiny, a tea, her candle that smelled like bamboo and pressed linen, and a heavy knitted blanket. now, and it could be the joining or it could just be surviving the war (it’s hard to conclude without any controlled variables) she prefers something with a bit more of a bite. 

she would be lying if she said that it didn’t bother her that she’s so different now. julian likes to point out that they’ve all changed because of the war (and it hurts her, to remember how green he was when they started, how when he says that they’ve all changed, he means himself as well). some changes have been a bit more tangible than others. kira doesn’t say much about it at all, and ezri suspects it’s because she never knew much of a life in the absence of war, and couldn’t have been changed by it so much as formed by it. 

in any case, she doesn’t drink to get drunk anymore. the worm inside her is far more capable of making her forget who she is than any kind of drug. the burn down her throat makes her pulse beat harder in her neck, and dax settles inside her carefully. 

the first time she felt the symbiont move inside her, still on the destiny, weak-kneed and pale from the joining, ezri vomited her lunch onto the smooth tile of the bathroom in her quarters. beaming it into the waste reclamator was easy, but she was shaking for at least an hour after, spacesick and nauseous from having something that wasn’t her moving inside her. 

she tried meditating to settle herself, closed her eyes and lined up her breathing to the beat of her heart, but the silence pressed on her ears like a wave, and, eyes wide open, she had to gasp for breath against the vertigo. 

she gets a hypo for the space sickness now, when it hits her the hardest, if at all. she can still feel the station whirring and rotating and humming beneath her but instead of making her vomit, it just serves to remind her where she is, and who she is - even sometimes when jadzia takes over. 

she can feel it now, how the station is rotating slowly, slowly, and jadzia bubbles up within her murmuring do you remember when and this is the place where and that’s my friend who. it’s kind of nice, having someone inside her who understands what it’s like to live here, although it took years for her to get to a place where she could say it was anything but confusing and horrible. 

having put all the effort into accepting herself, she doesn’t know what she’d do, if she could do it all over again. if, when the doctor said will you do it? she had just said no and walked away, taken the consequences from the commission as they came. if she’s honest, she’s glad she’ll likely never have to be in a position where she will have to make that decision again. it’s hard and it’s confusing and strange, but maybe she likes her life the way it is. 

she raises her hand to drain her drink, steadier than just minutes before, and pays the bartender. when she leaves, she’s not cured of herself, her scars, the pain. she’s coping. 

she holds on.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] something to hold onto](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18171311) by [miss_echidna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_echidna/pseuds/miss_echidna)




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